It’s quite possible that no manufacturer will build a better Radeon HD 5870 card than Asus’ Matrix 5870. In many ways, the Matrix 5870 is an exercise in engineering overachievement: A videocard that’s likely to outperform other Radeon HD 5870 cards, but that's priced so high that it’s really competing against the higher-end GeForce 480 GTX.

The Matrix ships with a core clock set at 894MHz and the memory clock at the default 1,200MHz. The card is designed from the ground up to be overclocked and over-volted, with premium components used throughout. Asus also added their Super Hybrid Engine control chip, which ensures clean power delivery, plus a new cooler design.

When a new GPU launches, most manufacturers ship videocards that look disturbingly similar. That’s because they’re either based on the GPU manufacturer’s reference design or, in the case of the initial Nvidia 480 GTX release, are actually built by the GPU manufacturer.

As time goes by, board makers become more comfortable with the GPU’s strengths and weaknesses and gain a better understanding of such issues as how memory clocks match to GPU clocks, which voltages work best for performance and/or product longevity, and so on. While all this is going on, the GPU maker either respins the chip or nails down the manufacturing process. And after a few months, we typically see a spate of custom card designs, often factory overclocked, as vendors seek to distinguish their product from the competition.

GPUs that cost $500 are all well and good, but the sweet spot for high-end graphics cards is in the $350–$400 range. That’s still a good chunk of change, but it can get you a card with close to 90 percent of the performance of high-end cards.

That’s certainly true of EVGA’s GTX 470 SC. Built on a cut-down version of Nvidia’s high-end, DirectX 11 GPU, this card posted eyebrow-raising benchmarks, pretty much putting it into a class of its own.

Just about everyone knows that Nvidia’s hot new Fermi graphics chip is literally hot. So, when Asus bundled its new ENGTX480 card with a custom voltage tweaker for overclocking, we wondered if it was such a good idea.

After all, do you really need the card to run hotter? And with the speed of the ENGTX480, you probably don’t need the higher clocks anyway. The ENGTX480 ships with 32 shader processors (what Nvidia calls “CUDA cores”) disabled, yet the card still manages to be the fastest single-GPU card you can buy today.

You have to give AMD credit for trying to make lemonade out of lemons.

The Radeon HD 5830 is the odd duck of AMD’s 5000-series GPUs. The card itself is as long as the high-end HD 5870, and consumes more power at idle than the Radeon HD 5850. But that’s what you’d expect of a card built on a “salvaged” chip.

Salvaged chips are produced by taking chips that fail to pass muster as the highest-end part and selling them as lower-end parts. This can be seen in the Radeon HD 5830, which has 1,120 stream processors active, as opposed to 1,440 for the HD 5850 or 1,600 for the 5870.

Unlike AMD’s lower-end HD 5770, which uses the Juniper GPU, with 1.05 billion transistors and 800 stream processors, the 5830 sports the same 2.15-billion-transistor GPU as the 5870/5850, with more functional units disabled.

We’ve never been major advocates of GPU overclocking, as the minor gains you achieve often don’t justify the added heat and instability. But there’s a clear difference between Billy Joe doing a maximum overclock on his GPU and a vendor overclocking the part at the factory.

So when XFX offered up its XXX Edition of the already-fast Radeon HD 5870, we were naturally curious. XFX pushes the HD 5870 to 875MHz (3 percent over the stock 850MHz) and juices the memory to 1,300MHz (8.3 percent over the stock 1,200MHz). At first blush, a 3 percent core overclock seems minimal. Given that the card costs about $430, versus about $405 for the stock XFX variant, is it worth the extra jingle?

To find out, we compared the performance of the XXX Edition to a standard XFX Radeon HD 5870, which is a stock card in every respect. Save for clock speeds, the two cards are identical: memory (1GB), ports (two DVI, one DisplayPort, one HDMI), and the reference cooling system. Because of the speed bumps to the XXX Edition’s core and memory clocks, its system idle power usage varies from the stock card, reaching 148W versus 141W.

Can you get great gaming performance for $99? That’s the burning question we wanted to answer when the XFX Radeon HD 5670 arrived. The version we tested, with 512MB of GDDR5, can be found for just under a hundred buckazoids on the web. The other question: How well does it stack up against a similarly priced Nvidia card?

Like other Radeon 5000 series GPUs, the 5670 chip is built on a 40nm manufacturing process. For those still trying to wrap their heads around the huge size of the Radeon HD 5970, the 5670 is a mere 6.5 inches long, occupies just a single PCI-E slot, and has no requirements for a power connector. The two cards, of course, are not in the same class.

The HD 5670 has half the stream processors, texture units, and ROPs of the Radeon HD 5770. The GPU core is also clocked lower, as is the GDDR5 memory. With these specs, we expected something to give when running games. Sure enough, when we tried running modern games at 1680x1050 at high detail, the frame rates were unacceptable. Antialiasing? No way.

The recipe: Take two of the fastest GPUs on the planet capable of running DirectX 11, specially chosen for their low voltage leakage. Toss in two gigabytes of high-speed GDDR5 memory. Mix all ingredients into a card with high-end Japanese solid capacitors and a souped-up thermal dissipation system. The result: the XFX Radeon HD 5970—a GPU so yummy, you may even go back for seconds.

While the product name doesn’t hint at the card’s dual-GPU nature, there’s no mistaking the presence of two graphics chips when you check out the back of the board. Then there’s the sheer size of it: At more than 12 inches, you’ll need a high-end PC case that’s deep enough to handle this monster. You’ll need a beefy power supply, too, since the HD 5970 burns 294W at full throttle—and that’s if you don’t overclock it. The good news is the card consumes just 42W at idle, less than double the idle power of a single HD 5870, thanks to an enhanced deep-sleep mode for the slave GPU.

AMD has wasted no time bringing its DirectX 11 GPU architecture to a more affordable, mainstream-class GPU in the HD 5770. HIS is one of the first manufacturers to bring the HD 5770 to market.

At around $160, the card is priced similarly to existing Radeon HD 4870 cards. It’s the lowest-cost card in the roundup, and given the 180mm2 die size (that’s incredibly tiny for a GPU), prices are likely to eventually come down even further.

It’s easy to be seduced by the latest and greatest graphics cards, but you can sometimes find excellent deals in older-generation cards that can still keep up with today’s shader-heavy PC games. Gigabyte’s 260 GTX SuperOC is a good example.

To make the cards, Gigabyte starts with cherry-picked 260 GTX chips from the factory. Then it clocks the GPUs at 680MHz, more than 100MHz faster than the standard 576MHz. Similarly, the SuperOC pushes the shader clock to 1,466MHz, instead of the stock 1,350MHz. Rounding off the performance push is 896MB of GDDR3 running at 1.25GHz instead of 1GHz. Gigabyte delivers these rarefied clock rates at slightly less than $200.